The Offspring of Printers
by PhantomHeiress
Summary: Thor's hammer is at the drycleaners, so he's using a temporary replacement: a piece of paper. ONE-SHOT, CRACK. Rated T for talking floors, Loki's angst, and a particular Batman Lego.


**Author's Note: **Warning. This is crack. Not cracky crack, but crack nonetheless. So if you don't like crack, I suggest you run. :D If you continue to pursue, enjoy! And tell meh what you think!

I love writing this stuff.

And, yes. It has Loki in it.

**TO THE STORY!**

"WHERE THE," Tony's words, which echoed inside the Iron Man suit, were too colorful and had to be censored in order to make such a phrase PG, "IS GOLDILOCKS?" Steve, who was fighting alongside Tony, turned around for just a moment.

He was right. Thor wasn't there.

This enraged Tony to the point that he was ready to chuck away the fight they were engaged in. He wanted to storm off the city street to go find out where Thor was. And when he DID find him, he planned on doing horrible, unspeakable things.

Because no one got to take a raincheck on an Avengers battle. No one.

If rainchecks were an option, Tony would be sleeping right now. But he wasn't sleeping right now. So Thor had better get his fat Asgardian a-

"HERE AM I!" Thor's dramatic entrance stirred up the concrete on the street. Tony growled and shot another beam of light at an approaching enemy. The citizens of New York were flailing, screaming, dodging around, but everyone seemed to quiet when Thor landed like a butterfly on the pavement. A large cluster of fangirls assembled together, made up a few "I LOVE THOR" signs, and cheered him on from the side of the road.

Tony shot a beam at them, too; which earned him a very accusatory look from Captain America.

"Where were you?" Natasha stormed up to Thor while the others held the battle at bay. For one moment, one single moment, fear flashed through Thor's eyes when Black Widow came inches away from his face. "Get involved NOW!"

"Yes, Lady Romanoff!" Thor clenched his beautiful jaw line and went to go stand in the classic Avengers circle. Feeling finally at ease, Tony got back into the flow of it all: an uppercut here, a knee to the crotch there, a little bit of explosion and flare and… He glanced over at Thor to see how he was doing. Probably swinging Mjolnir like an infant… wait… that wasn't Mjolnir…

"Thor, what in the hell is that?" Tony exclaimed, putting one metallic hand on his hip. Thor swung around to look at him. His hair swung over his shoulders as he looked over.

Angels sang.

"This is Mjolnir." Thor's statement was oh-so-simple, like Tony should have already known this. He even held up the object in his hand for emphasis. Obviously these puny humans needed to be prompted into learning. He extended it for Tony to see.

It was a piece of average-sized paper, with the world "MJOLNIR" printed very clearly on the front in Times New Roman font. It fluttered gently in the wind.

Tony gazed at it for a long moment in stupefied horror.

A piece of paper.

Paper.

One piece of it.

"Is this some sort of crappy rendition of a joke?" Tony finally asked, after having his words snatched away from him for a long moment.

"Oh, absolutely not!" Thor declared. And the sky rumbled for a moment. "Though printing it was very difficult. It seemed as if the printer wanted to sing me the song of its people before I was allowed to take the paper." Thor gazed at the back of the sign. "Such an ugly song, too. Mating for printers must be difficult with songs like that."

Stark, who had his fill of mental scarring for the day, only asked one more question. "Well, where's your hammer?"

"At the drycleaners."

Tony did a double take for too long and was tackled by a member of the opposing force. So Clint took up the role of interrogating Thor in between his arrow-slinging.

"Since when did mythical hammers need to be drycleaned?" He asked.

"Mjolnir is no ordinary hammer, and she deserves the most attentive care. The drycleaners, I heard, were the most attentive here on Midgard." Thor straightened out the paper on his thigh. Hawkeye tried his best to ignore the fact that Thor had just assigned his weapon a gender. He tried even harder to not picture how a weapon could have a gender. And he tried harder still to not imagine how you would find out the gender of a weapon.

"Until then," Thor continued, "This replacement will work just fine." He held up the paper. The wind caught it a little, and the 'replacement' flew out of Thor's hand and skidded across the pavement. The scrambling dance that the God did to retrieve the paper back could have easily won the nearest dancing competition. It fluttered by Steve's feet and he stopped to look down at it.

"Oh, don't worry, I'll get it for you, Thor." Steve was always too nice. Tony gagged at his kindness. Cap reached down to pick up the printer paper.

But he couldn't pick it up.

Like it was glued to the sidewalk.

Cap was suddenly very resolute to "unstuck" it. He set down his shield and gripped the paper with two white-knuckled fists, and then he leaned back with all his body weight. Thor pushed him away, picked up the paper with ease, and then skipped off to fight.

This did a horrible amount of damage to Cap. He couldn't pick up a stupid piece of paper. What a blow to his self esteem. And all those memories of being mocked when he was younger came flooding back to him in a tidal wave.

What's wrong with me? He thought. Maybe it was because I never had any parents…

On that sidewalk, Steve curled up into the fetal position and mulled in the dark memories of his past. He just sat there, holding his knees, and cried.

"Wha… what's wrong with him?" Natasha nudged Clint to get his attention. Clint didn't even turn around to look.

"Don't make eye contact with him, it makes it more awkward."

Even the enemies avoided the sobbing captain, making sure to give him a wide berth when they passed him. Because they were freaked out.

Steve's wracking cries filled the air.

"NO ONE LOVES ME!"

**xXxXx**

It seemed as if the drycleaners took a little longer than anticipated with Thor's hammer. Pathetic mortals. Thor was sure they had received many mythical hammers to clean. By now they should have already known how to use their cleaning supplies.

Pashaw.

And to the disgruntlement of the entire Avengers team, Thor continued to use his sheet of printer paper to do battle. What made them even more confused is that he was doing well with it, and the paper had only received a few bends. This pissed Tony off so much that he went back to his mansion to sleep, with the very solid declaration "I AM NOT WAKING UP UNTIL SOMEONE SHREDS THAT STUPID PAPER!"

So, what else was Hawkeye to do? He decided to shred the paper.

It was late, late at night in the Avenger's mansion. Hawkeye was sneaking silently across the smooth tile floors in his bare feet, carrying a garbage can with a shredder underneath his arm. And everything was going perfectly fine…

"OW! OH DAMN!" Hawkeye exclaimed, the house echoing his cries. A white hot pain rocketed up his leg, originating from his foot. He cringed, trying to silence himself, as he reached down to pry the attacker out of his toe. He held it up to look at it in the glimmery moonlight.

It was a Lego Batman figurine.

"Not cool…" Hawkeye muttered. "That is so not cool…" He chucked it away and, even with his crippling disability, continued to push on in the night.

This was probably the most stressful thing he'd done in his life. Trying to sneak into Thor's bedroom was like walking into Mordor.

One does not simply walk into Thor Odinson's bedroom.

And it seemed, inside the door to his room, every tiny creak on the floor was magnified like screaming. The floorboards were screaming at him. Each step convinced him that he had just stepped on a firecracker.

One particular floorboard let out a long, wailing "ARRRRRRRRRAAAAAAARARRHHHHH!" Hawkeye cringed, looked up at the slumbering mass in the bed, and then down at the floor.

"Do not do that again!" Hawkeye pointed at it.

"My apologies." The floor muttered back. Hawkeye nodded politely and continued on. The floor gave him no more trouble.

Hawkeye was sleep deprived.

He crouched down next to Thor's massive bed (Why did THOR get a huge bed and Clint got a run down mattress? He was going to be writing an angry letter after this…) and set the shredder atop the small garbage can. He clicked it on, and the small machine parts inside hummed to life. Hawkeye rubbed his hands together before attempting the next part of this mission.

Then he took a deep breath and popped up to get the paper out of the bearhug Thor had on it. He tried to pull it away from Thor's massive chest, but it was immovable, like it was made out of metal. Eventually, Hawkeye realized what he could do…

He took Thor's hand, and used it like tongs to grip onto the paper and take it to the shredder on the floor. When stretching out Thor's arm, Hawkeye had the opportunity to see the workings of rippling muscles.

"How does he DO THAT?" Hawkeye muttered, looking at the huge bicep and then at his own… "What is that bump in between his bicep and his tricep?"

But when Thor mumbled something in his sleep, Hawkeye snapped back to the mission.

Closer and closer the paper got to the shredder. Closer to the humming mechanics… closer… closer… It was going into the shredding blades. Almost…

The entire west wing of the Avengers mansion exploded.

Boom.

The massive mushroom cloud rocketed up to the heavens.

Thor grunted in his sleep, grabbed the undamaged MJOLNIR paper, and went back into his pleasant dreams.

Hawkeye, now charred and smoking, was pressed up against the wall. He opened his mouth, and a puff of smoke floated out. Just more to add to his angry letter.

**xXxXx**

_**LATER THAT WEEK, ON ASGARD…**_

"Brother! Stop this madness!" Thor screamed. And, as much as you wouldn't think such a scream would be effective on the massive rainbow bridge, it was. Loki, looking particularly disheveled in the dark, starry light, flipped around to face Thor.

"I do what I want, Thor!" Loki screamed back. "After all this time of you pursuing me, I would expect you to realize this already!" He looked down at his fingernails.

"Brother, this evil within you can be silenced!" Thor begged.

"Stop with the sentiment! You use it so much! I've already killed so many people!" Loki then mocked, "You're right, Thor, I'm just going to give up my dictator dreams and become a PRIEST!" Thor seemed like he took the statement seriously, so Loki continued on. "JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!"

"Fine, then, brother…" Thor reached down into the bag he had around his shoulder. "You leave me no choice."

"Why do you have a purse with you?" Loki leaned over to see what he was doing. "Thor, what are you reaching for?" Thor pulled out a piece of paper, folded many times, and began the tedious process of unfolding it. Loki stared at him monotonously.

"Nope." Loki said after a moment of deadpan. "I'm leaving." He turned around and started walking for the edge of the rainbow bridge. He had been written into so many different kinds of these fanfictions, and some had very ridiculous concepts (some even paired him with that dancing American apparel hooligan, a thought that made Loki shudder to his core.). But _this?_ A piece of paper? Never had an author insulted his intelligence in such a way.

(Though Loki found that this breaking of the fourth wall was calming his nerves.) He scratched his neck and continued walking. He was going to go down to Midgard and find out what a manicure was. All of this evil doing had done evil on his fingernails.

Thor finally finished unfolding MJOLNIR and smoothed out the crinkles.

And before Loki could blink, he was tackled to the rainbow bridge, and Thor smacked the piece of paper onto his chest.

"Wha…?" Loki, now splayed on his back, looked down at the paper, then up at Thor.

"I will come back later, Loki. When you have thought about what you've done."

Loki snuffed and reached up to throw this paper away from him. It was insulting him. So much. But it was immovable…

"WHAT IS THIS BLACK MAGIC?" Loki exclaimed, tensing his jaw and trying again to lift the paper. He grunted and slammed his head back on the rainbow bridge.

"It turns out, it isn't the hammer that was heavy, it was just the _name_…" Thor shrugged. "Who possessed such knowledge, right? These thin offspring of printers can be strong." He leaned down to tell Loki a secret. "But their mating song is so ugly." And he started walking back to the Asgard palace to leave Loki to fester in his 'guilt'. After a few more vain attempts to free himself, Loki gave up and leaned back.

He just sat there, spread out on the rainbow bridge for a long period of time. All he did was think about the many different ways to impale Thor. He could use spikes and rods and... Suddenly, however, he had a visitor.

A young woman sat down next to him on the bridge. She was wearing an Iron Man sweatshirt and had a pencil tucked into her mess of dishwater blonde hair. She peered down eagerly at Loki with her murky green eyes, which were encased in a simple black masquerade mask.

"Who the hell are _you_?" Loki asked slowly.

"You would know me as _PhantomHeiress_…listen…" The young fanfiction writer scooted closer to the trapped God, and he tried to scoot away. "I want to talk to you about the other fanfiction that I'm writing, Dark Humor? You're in that one, too… I wanted to talk about some plot details with you."

"No."

"You don't have a choice." She tapped the paper on his chest in mockery. And then she continued to ramble on about her ideas. Loki watched her in horror and a tear drizzled off his cheek.

"I hate my life. I hate my life so much…"

**xXxXx**

"Tony…" The gentle, water-calm voice eased Anthony out of his sleep. He hummed pleasantly and turned over, waiting for the gentle female voice to coax him again. But it was Hawkeye's calming voice that came next.

"Tony, wake up…" So gentle and sing-song… Tony flickered open his eyes and looked over to see the Black Widow and Hawkeye next to his bed.

"Thor's hammer is finally back from the drycleaners and we wanted to tell you that we rented a bouncy house to celebrate." Natasha hummed. "We know you like bouncy houses."

"I do like bouncy houses."

"We also bought a ton of alcohol." Hawkeye added. This was sounding even better to Anthony, who was prepared to jump out of bed right away.

"And Tom Hiddleston is on his way to hang out with us." Natasha started heading out the door. "Too bad, though, that you'll miss it."

"WHAT?" Tony's eyes snapped open and he looked down at his chest. The MJOLNIR paper was resting there gently, flapping softly in the wind from his ceiling fan. He struggled, but had no way to get out of it. Downstairs, he could hear the crew screaming and enjoying the party.

"Here…" Hawkeye pulled a paper out of his pocket and set it right by the other on Tony's chest. "This is an angry letter I want you to read." And on top of that, he set the Batman Lego. "You really need to fix the floors in this place. And repair the west wing."

Then Hawkeye skipped away to go play in the bouncy house.


End file.
